If Ninja Made $1 Million Streaming Apex Legends, He Deserved It

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that well-known streamers can make a lot of money. Many get by just on donations and subscriptions to their Twitch or YouTube channels, but if you’re a big deal, game companies will pay you directly to promote their games. If you’re a really big deal, they’ll pay you a lot. That was the case with Apex Legends and Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, who reportedly was paid a cool million dollars to stream Respawn Entertainment’s and Electronic Arts’ battle royale when it was new earlier this month. According to Reuters, another streamer, Shroud, was also paid to promote the game via his stream. “We had streamers from all over Europe, LatAm, North America, Korea, Japan so that we could get our message out there and people would see the game,” said Apex Legends Lead Producer Drew McCoy. That’s the news portion of this story, so now I’ll get into some editorializing. I’ve already seen a fair number of comments on other sites — and wouldn’t be surprised to see some more here — decrying the practice of paying streamers and YouTubers to promote games. I’m in complete agreement that the financial connection should have been disclosed, so that you knew Ninja was streaming the game because he was paid to do so. Maybe it was; I don’t feel like looking through all his tweets and videos to find out if he did. The other part that I see people grousing about? That companies just shouldn’t pay… [Read full story]